Traditionally, jukeboxes were large machines containing a collection of vinyl records or compact discs (CD's) and a record player or CD player to play songs selected by users. Because these jukeboxes were mainly located in public establishments, such as bars and restaurants, routinely updating conventional jukeboxes was a lengthy and cumbersome task, requiring routemen to travel to each jukebox location to replace outdated recordings with up-to-date records or CD's.
The development of computer jukeboxes provided a major advance in ease of music management for jukeboxes because the songs in a computer jukebox are stored in digital format on a digital memory. Therefore, because computer jukeboxes no longer require cumbersome records or CD's, computer jukeboxes may be very small and may be located in a wide variety of public and private locations. Furthermore, computer jukeboxes are not limited to playing music, but may play songs, videos, and other forms of entertainment (“entertainment content”). As used herein, the term “song,” “music,” “album,” or “video” also refers generally to entertainment content. Essentially, any computer system capable of playing entertainment content on demand or in any automated fashion is a computer jukebox.
Computer jukeboxes have an additional advantage regarding entertainment content management in that a computer jukebox may be linked to a data center, which can optionally be located remotely, to download entertainment content. A computer jukebox administrator may therefore add new entertainment content, such as songs or entire albums, to a local file in the digital memory by selecting and downloading music from the data center. Music or other forms of entertainment content stored in the local file of the digital memory is referred to as “local music”.
An administrator of a conventional computer jukebox must choose which songs or albums to download to the local file in the digital memory. Conventionally, the administrator must choose music based on popularity reports generated by the computer jukebox or by fielding requests from users. However, these methods are time consuming and imprecise, and therefore, an administrator may have difficulty choosing the most popular music for the computer jukebox users.
The digital memory of computer jukeboxes may store a large number of local music files. However, the storage capacity of a digital memory may only accommodate a finite amount of music. Therefore, an administrator may need to remove less popular songs or albums before he can add more popular songs or albums because, in conventional computer jukeboxes, local music is not automatically erased when new local music is stored to the local file of the digital memory. Again, conventional methods of selecting the least popular music to remove may be time consuming and imprecise.
Another advantage of a digital jukebox is that music stored at the data center may be available to be selected for play by a user. Therefore, a user may select a song for play that is not stored in the digital memory. Music stored at the data center but not on the digital memory of the computer jukebox is referred to as Music On Demand (“MOD”) music. A large selection of local music is desirable despite the availability of MOD music, because users are generally charged more to select a MOD song than to select a local song, because the content is more readily available (e.g., there is no delay caused by the need to download the song from the data center), and because songs in the local file can still be played even if the connection to the data center is disconnected or faulty.
When a user selects a MOD song for play, the digital song file may be downloaded from the data center to the digital memory and stored in a temporary cache in the digital memory so that it may be played. This type of music is called cached MOD music. The song file may be stored in the temporary cache while the song is being played, but may be written over when a new MOD song is downloaded due to a user selecting a song for play. The computer jukebox may store a plurality of cached MOD music files in the temporary cache and may play the song from the temporary cache rather than download the MOD selection at subsequent times when a user selects that song. However, songs stored in the temporary cache will eventually be recorded over and erased when a certain number of new MOD songs are selected for play. This arrangement may lead to the undesirable result in which more popular songs are erased from the temporary cache while less popular songs are kept indefinitely in the local file.
What is needed is an automated way to manage entertainment content on a digital jukebox.